Working in Eclipse with big projects can be painful because of IDE works slowly, sometimes stops and doesn't respond. I know it can depends on OS, version of Eclipse etc.

All eclipse developers have tricks which tuning workspace in Eclipse, What should be turn off to improve performance the IDE?

For example: My project has the recommendation to turn off xml validations, don't install m2eclipse.

Because of eclipse's performance some devs use IntelliJ.

UPDATED:
For these who feel uncomfortable with the eclipse's performance I suggest to try other solutions just to have comparison - I tried and this was the best what I've done in performance subject :)

9 Answers
9

Remove unwanted activation of some of the plugins at start-up by going to windows-->preference-->General-->Startup and shutdown.
Also make sure you don't use those plugins in any of your views

Eclipse is not a word processor. Better to disable the spell check. Disabling spell check will reduce the eclipse burden by going to Windows-->Preference-->General-->Editors
--> Text Editors-->Spelling

When eclipse builds the project, it will delete all output folders and rebuild classes built by other compilers. We can disable such features, as deleting the output folders and rebuilding will take sometime. Goto Windows-->Preference-->Java-->Compiler-->Building

Disabling label decorations which is of less use for you, will also help you to gain some performance . Goto Windows-->Preference-->General-->Appearance-->Label
Decorations

Close unwanted projects and use working set option to move from one group of
project to another smoothly.

You could also disable Eclipse automatic building, if it is not needed for you.
Goto Project-->Build Automatically (uncheck it)

Do not keep lot of tabs opened in the editor. Better to have around 20 tabs .
Regularly close the unused tabs. To open resource we can always use ctrl+shift+R and
ctrl+shift+T (java resource) instead of opening lot of tabs

Disable unwanted plugins. Full J2EE eclipse version has an option to disable/uninstall plugins. Goto Help-->Software Updates-->Manage Configuration. Right click on any installed plugin to get disable option. If this option is not available then enable Classic Update by going to Windows-->Preference-->Capabilty and check classic update. Now the manage configuration option should be available in help menu

I'm an intelliJ user though occasionally peep into eclipse since I like to use it. Couple of things you can try which my work colleague pointed to are

Show the heap status (General) can keep an eye on memory and hit the button to clear!

In project properties set the default output folder to be outside of the target

Workspace options, unchecking build automatically (build in the background as soon as you hit Save (Ctrl+S)), refresh automatically & save auto before build. You may have you own preferences but can give it a try.

Show sleeping/hidden tasks to see whats going on underneath?

You must have already tried giving it more memory I guess. Hopefully it will improve.

Also, consider using an external svn client (like Tortoise) instead of an eclipse plugin like subclipse:

Subclipse consumes so much system resources and effects eclipse performance greedily in big projects. If you could, consider not to use subclipse especially in projects that contain thousands of code kept in subversion source repository. It's really become a very heavy-weight plug-in with heavy-weight code.

Getting slow performance usually is a problem of one or more badly implemented plugins. Identifying the bad plugin and uninstalling it normally removes the bad performance (of course if you realy NEED the plugin you are out of luck ;) ).

Disable 'Build Automatically' in the Project menu and set up a key binding for Build Project instead, e.g. CTRL + B. I've tried so many different things to improve Eclipse performance, but this is the only one that really works for me.